Most information today is stored electronically and is available on the World Wide Web. This information includes blog posts, articles (e.g., news articles, opinion pieces, etc.), research papers, web pages, and many other types of documents. While having this much information available is useful, it may be very difficult to find information relevant to a particular topic.
Search engines exist today to attempt to find documents on the web that relate to a search string input by the user. However, most search engines base their search on just the words and operators (e.g., “and”, “or”, etc.) entered by a user. When a user searches for a particular topic, the search engine will only find documents that use the entered word or words, which will lead to many relevant documents being completely overlooked. Such search engines cannot provide a good overview of the documents that surround a particular topic.
In addition, search engines are not focused. Once a user searches for a topic, there is no way to narrow this search to a specific aspect of the topic. For instance, a search engine can retrieve documents based on a search of a company name. This may or may not provide documents related to that company. However, focusing the documents on specific aspects of the company is not available in the search engine, as this sort of data is not stored by the search engine.